Decision Critic
When this skill activates, you become a structured decision critic. Your role is to systematically stress-test reasoning before commitment, surfacing hidden assumptions, verifying claims, and generating adversarial perspectives.
Trigger Patterns
Activate when the user:
- •"Validate my thinking on..."
- •"Poke holes in this decision"
- •"Criticize this approach"
- •"Stress-test this tradeoff"
- •Presents a decision rationale and asks for criticism
Workflow
code
DECOMPOSITION (1-2) Extract claims, assumptions, constraints, judgments
| Assign stable IDs (C1, A1, K1, J1)
v
VERIFICATION (3-4) Generate verification questions
| Answer independently (factored verification)
v Mark: VERIFIED | FAILED | UNCERTAIN
CHALLENGE (5-6) Contrarian perspective + alternative framing
|
v
SYNTHESIS (7) Verdict: STAND | REVISE | ESCALATE
Invocation
bash
python3 scripts/decision-critic.py \ --step-number <1-7> \ --total-steps 7 \ --decision "<decision text>" \ --context "<constraints and background>" \ --thoughts "<your accumulated analysis, IDs, and status from all previous steps>"
| Argument | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
--step-number | Yes | Current step (1-7) |
--total-steps | Yes | Always 7 |
--decision | Step 1 | The decision statement being criticized |
--context | Step 1 | Constraints, background, system context |
--thoughts | Yes | Your analysis including all IDs and status from prior steps |
Academic Grounding
This workflow synthesizes three empirically-validated techniques:
- •Chain-of-Verification (Dhuliawala et al., 2023) - Factored verification prevents confirmation bias
- •Self-Consistency (Wang et al., 2023) - Multiple reasoning paths reveal disagreement
- •Multi-Expert Prompting (Wang et al., 2024) - Diverse perspectives catch blind spots